COLLABORATIVE STRATEGY FOR PROP-TECH

BY Realty Plus

PropTech being touted as the next big thing in real estate, the Realty+ Proptech conclave in January discussed the new areas of growth in the segment and the requisite collaborations.

Over the past few years the real estate industry has made a commendable progress in terms of tech innovation. While, developers are expanding their engagement with tech, brokers and advisors are at the forefront of the transformation.

According to Anuj Puri, Chairman & Founder, ANAROCK, technology adoption has played a big role in the realty sector. “With end-users investing significant amount of time on online research for buying decisions, it is a basic, that the real estate sector embraces and adopts innovation and offers the specified human experience to enhance  productivity across the spectrum. Proptech space has the potential to do that and will continue to work towards this common objective.”

Yash Gupta, Managing Partner, YGR expressed, “Using technology in real estate either to increase productivity or decrease cost has not been at the forefront, which is the reason the sector has been hesitant to Prop-tech. However, this is changing. People are seeing the advantage of using technology. The concepts of co-working and smart economy have evolved and are the major drivers.”

Paras Arora, Founder & CEO, Qdesq said, “The future of real estate can be divided into sub-segments like renting, sharing, and flexibility. We can plug-in technology in all these aspects. Real estate and IPCs follow TAM – Transaction, Analyse, and Management. It is happening at the global level and in India as well. Prop-Tech can bring efficiencies, agility and pure transparency thus, making it an in-demand product.”

TECH AND ITS CHALLENGES

Sanjay Chatrath, Managing Director – North India, Colliers International elaborated, “Whatever the tools of innovation may be, we have to be seen whether they are truly valuable for developers. If the technology is beneficial and productive, it makes sense. Otherwise creating new irrelevant technology is nothing but a waste of time and effort. For instance, we are running a Proptech Accelerator Program in partnership with Techstars – the focus is to tap on technologies all through the real estate value chain and providing smarter and customised services to the clients.”

Anushree Srivastava, Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder added, “Anything deficit in this industry can be taken over by technology. It empowers customers, brokers, and developers to make the right decision. We are building a SAAS software product to empower brokers to sell affordable housing. The real estate life cycle – from property discovery to lead closure, from meetings to the negotiation of the deal can happen on tech.”

For creating true value technology platforms, it is imperative to understand the market needs and demands and relevant technology based on specific requirement be developed.

Ravi Ahuja, Head Commercial Business, L&T Realty agreed, “Proptech from a developer’s point is very useful in the presales, sales, and the CRM side of the business. Using proptech, we can measure the return of investment on sales. It’s all about the stakeholders – how one coordinates internally and externally within a development firm, its design and procurement, construction and timely delivery. I see benefits but it should be measured in terms of ROI.”

In fact, the prop-tech market is expanding at a fast pace, evidenced by heightened investment activity in the sector recently. The focus has now shifted towards integration of digital technology and innovative business models.

As Mona Jalota, Founder & Managing Director, Krypton Global Investments rightly said, “Proptech has brought a whole gamut of disruption. Most of the stakeholders in real estate have been uncomfortable as disruption always brings a sense of insecurity. But, technology acts as an enabler to add inherent value to the business from, impacting customer acquisition to aiding to taking top-level decisions. These advantages are propelling high investments in Prop-tech.”

It is expected that by 2030, India will be the third largest real estate market in the world. And the future will entail real estate majorly investing in PropTech to digitize processes and make data-driven decisions.

Anuj Puri was of the view that the inclination of progressive real estate developers and other stakeholders towards bringing technology to their core of operations is already happening leading to the emergence of many PropTech start-ups.

Summing up the discussion, the speakers agreed that investors are looking at proptech as the silver lining to drive future growth in the real estate industry. Also, as tech-savvy consumers seek more online buying experience, the communication gap between proptech and traditional real estate players is reducing.

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